Harish Narayanan said on Fri, May 07, 2004 at 12:03:03PM -0400,:
A primary reason they aren't as wide spread are because of societal inertia,
<snip>
Do I want it installed? No. Do I need it installed? Not really. Am I one of the 210 million who paid for it anyway? Yes. Did I have much of a choice? Yes and no.
See??
You had a choice, did not exercise it, and blame `intertia'?
Huh?? Did you say `What about the greenbacks I paid?'? We have a restrictive trade practises law much stronger than that of US of A.
I could have tried really hard to find a company that sells a
Inertia, is the word.
The largest and oldest hardware-cum-software vendor in the world supports GNU/Linux on their PCs. May be you did not ask the right question?
RedHat is a major supporter of many free software projects,
Yes ...
and doesn't ship anything proprietary with their operating systems.
Not very sure of that. Maybe, going by hearsay, this holds good for the free-as-in-beer version of RH which we used to get till sometime back. Cannot say the same for the paid version. I have not used the paid version, so dunno. Hope somebody will clarify on whether paid isos from RH contain non-free binaries.
Tha apart, a major component of the RPM system is considered non-free by Debian since its license imposes burdens on users.
I respect them for this,
Me too.